Undertakers warned of 40,000 dead

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Officials with the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational
Response Team made the grim assessment this week.

According to a report yesterday in the Shelbyville Times-Gazette
in Tennessee, a local funeral director, Dan Buckner, said: "DMORT
is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies." Mr Buckner confirmed
the figure for The Age.

He said the figure, for Mississippi and Louisiana, came from his
business partner Gary Hicks, who received the briefing from
officials from the response team in Alabama.

The agency is part of the National Disaster Medical System,
administered by the embattled Federal Emergency Management
Agency.

"When they start going through those houses, everyone was told
to go to their attics (to escape the rising floodwaters), but not
to take tools to chop through the roof," Mr Buckner said
yesterday.

"There's going to be numerous bodies in those attics and they
haven't even started going through the high-rise complexes. With as
many elderly and poor people as there are in New Orleans parish,
logic could only be that there's going to be a large number of
fatalities."